The grift and glory of the Enhanced Games

0:00So good, so good, so good. Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack Stores now and up to 60 % off. Stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince, Sam Edelman, Frame and Free People. Join the Nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. What's up, y 'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports.

0:39And mom. And this is And Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Roid Rage. I'm your friend David Pierce. And on today's show, we're going to talk to The Verge's Victoria Song, who recently went to Las Vegas to go to the Enhanced Games. Everybody calls the Enhanced Games the Steroid Olympics, which is not a completely wrong description. But the idea of giving athletes all of the possible biological and medical advantages they have and then seeing what happens is just deeply fascinating.

1:18V had a wild time. We're going to get into it. I'm very excited. But first, here's a look at everything happening on The Verge today. It's 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. Supernatural, everybody's favorite VR fitness game, appears to have a new lease on life. A few months ago, when Meta laid off big chunks of its metaverse and VR teams, it seemed like Supernatural was just kind of being left to die. But now, my colleague Victoria Song reports that it's being spun off as an independent company called Supernatural Health. And importantly, it's going to be run by the original founders and coaches of Supernatural.

1:52This is a huge win for Supernatural moms, for VR fitness fans, for VR fans in general, and frankly for me, who now has a reason to turn on my quest for the first time in, I don't know, a year. Big win. Google put out a big blog post today laying out its commitment to solving some of the water problems created by data centers. It said that it plans to replenish more water than it uses by 2030. It said it will invest in local water infrastructure where it has data centers. It says it will find other water sources, and it will just be honest and transparent about its water use. Google is just one of the companies grappling with this giant backlash against data centers.

2:30And at least in part, that backlash is about water usage and these other environmental concerns. Google seems to hope that other companies will match this commitment and follow its lead here, and that this might make people feel better about having data centers in their communities. I'm not so sure any of that is going to work. And frankly, I would argue there are much bigger problems here than water usage. But we'll see. Google also published the specs and guidelines for people to make their own straps, cases, and other accessories for the new Fitbit Air, the$99 fitness tracker people are really excited about.

3:02I've already been seeing people build ways to combine the Air with a watch. So you can have a watch on top and the Air on the bottom and get the best of both worlds. Very excited to see where this little modular fitness tracker goes. I think it's going to be very cool. You can read about all of this and much more at TheVerge.com. That's it. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for June 3rd. All right, now let's talk Stereolympics. The Verge's V song is here. Hi, V. Hello. Back from Vegas, you survived a turn at the Enhanced Games. Are you feeling enhanced? How do you feel these days? I decided to come to this podcast as unenhanced as possible, just as a reset.

3:42So I have glasses, which I don't know if those count as an enhancement. And one of my ubiquitous smartwatches is on the charger. So this is about as unenhanced as I get. Not including the several injections you're currently getting as we record this. But we'll leave those to the side. Off screen, just I'm emotionally roided up. How's that? There we go. That counts. Let's get some of that out now. So let's just start at the very beginning here. What is the enhanced games? Where did this thing come from? Okay, so in 2023, Aaron D'Souza, a famous tech entrepreneur, basically came out and he's like, what if Olympics, but with performing enhancing drugs?

4:28Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of think pieces at the time about what that meant for ethics in sports. You know, forget ethics in games, ethics in sports.

4:38Victoria Song:Sure. And I think in 2025, they were just like, hey, guys, you remember when we said pro doping or the steroid Olympics? Yeah, we're actually going to do it. And then last weekend, over Memorial Day weekend, the inaugural Enhanced Games happened, where about, I believe, 42 athletes, four of which were unenhanced and the rest of whom were doping in some shape, way or form, got together at this makeshift stadium in what was formerly a barren lot in the backyard of the Hilton Las Vegas Resorts Hotel. Well, got together and did some sports and tried to break a bunch of world records because the prize money was up to$1 million if they broke a world record.

5:30I'm trying to figure out how much this is a sporting event, how much this is a scientific thing. There is some honest-to-God science being done here, it seems. And how much of this is just a bit to some extent, right? Like Donald Trump Jr. is a backer of this. Peter Thiel is a backer of this. There is a very specific kind of person who feels drawn to this event. And so I'm trying to figure out to what extent this idea of what if we did sports, but you were allowed to flaunt all of the rules of what you can and cannot put in your body. If you just take it at that level, as a sports fan, there's actually something really interesting about that, right?

6:10Really complicated. We should get into all the reasons that's complicated, But like this this thing as an organization, if I give you the spectrum between like honest to God sporting event, grifter bit and we'll put sort of genuine science right in the middle. Where does the enhanced games actually belong, do you think? I have been mulling this over for, again, probably the roughly 48 to 72 hours since it ended. And I think the unsatisfactory answer is that there's a little bit of everything in there. So one of the things that was really striking to me is that, you know, I've written about it before in Optimizer, but I have this theory called the Wellness Grifter Playbook.

6:55and that's where, again, you take a broad medically true fact and you put it next to a misleading assertion and in the process to boost your own credibility to sell something like a supplement or whatever your silver bullet cure is, you discredit an institution or like established institutional things that the average person is supposed to trust and at some point along the way, you profit. And the Enhanced Games does bits and pieces of this, but in ways that are unexpected, because the institutions that they're kind of throwing shade on is not medical institutions. It's not doctors like throughout everything.

7:36And, you know, we're always looking as journalists for are they lying to us? Are they trying to pull the wool over our eyes and all of that? I spoke to the CEO, Maximilian Martin, who is a character. I spoke to their chief medical officer or like the head of their independent medical commission, Dr. Guido Gilis, who is a really respected elite sports cardiologist who has worked with both FIFA and Manchester United FC for my soccer heads out there. and Christian Engermeyer, who is a biotech entrepreneur with ties to the Trump family, Peter Thiel, and all of those people. Every single one of them has been like, don't look at what's happening in the world right now where people are getting gray market peptides from China and injecting them into themselves irresponsibly without the medical supervision that's necessary.

8:30And I basically came at them at every single possible angle, forwards, sideways, the other sideways, upside down, diagonal, to kind of really get a sense if I felt that they didn't believe in medical supervision. And I did not get that. I talked to several of the athletes that's like, and these are elite athletes, mostly past their prime. But, you know, we're talking Olympic medal winners, James Manusen, Benjamin Proud. There were so many there. There even was Thor Bjornsson who played Gregor the Mountain Clegane in Game of Thrones. He was also at the event. So, you know, talking to several of these athletes who were absolutely ready to talk to press, all of them were just like, no, we worked with doctors.

9:16We're doing, we really care about the science. And there is an affiliated institutional review board approved clinical study that is not done yet because it will take five years for this study to be complete. So there is a lot of science going on. these people were tested out the wazoo. We're talking MRIs, CT scans, metabolic panels. I was told that if they were not able to pass a medical screening, that they would not be allowed to dope. Wait, hold on. Hold on. Make that sentence make sense to me. If they didn't pass a medical screening, they weren't allowed to dope. This, I think, is like there is a core misunderstanding of what the Enhanced Games is trying to do that I think is wrapped up in that sentence, right?

9:59Because there's one way to look at this that is just like, what if everything was allowed? If you're an athlete, there are a tremendous number of things you are simply not allowed to put in your body, some of which are very safe to put in your body, some of which are very unsafe to put in your body. These things are unbelievably heavily regulated. It seems to me the enhanced games are not, let's just take the top off of the regulation and do whatever you want and let's see what happens. it's actually aggressively regulated just in a slightly different direction like what is your understanding of kind of the rules of the road for the enhanced games in that sense so right like

10:35Victoria Song:when you say every performance enhancing drug is allowed you would expect that hello bpc 157 is on the table tb 500 everyone's going to be on a wolverine stack voided up to the gills and yeah Actually, that's not the case. They are only allowing FDA-approved drugs that happen to be used in a performance-enhancing context that is often banned by organizations like the World Anti-Doping Agency, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the IOC. So, right. Like testosterone is a very simple example of that, right? Testosterone is allowed. Okay. Some anabolic steroids are allowed. Something called EPO, which regulates your red blood cell production so that you can take in more oxygen, that is allowed.

11:23The sorts of things that if you're like an NBA player, you immediately get suspended for having an elevated testosterone level. But understanding how to elevate your testosterone level is a thing we have established science on. So this is just saying we are going to allow you to use that established science to give yourself whatever advantage it gives you. Yes.

11:43Victoria Song:Also, athletes don't necessarily control how much they get to take. When I talked to Dr. Pulas, he was like, we're not maxing them out on steroids. There is a specific period of time that they are allowed to dope under close medical supervision. They have to be healthy enough to dope. So let's say if their markers were showing that they could be put at health risks, they would not be allowed to take a certain amount. And the amounts that they're taking, they're not like, let's go maximum. Yeah. It's more like they're allowed to take a certain amount and then they'll work with their coaches and they'll work with the doctors to see if it's making an improvement.

12:27Victoria Song:And some of the examples that were given were like in a trial run that they did of this last year. And you can see before and after pictures of James Manusen where what he looked like when he was an Olympic athlete winning three Olympic gold medals. He looks like a typical swimmer, very lithe, very swimmerly. And then what he looked like when he first started enhancements. And it was a little more broad what he was taking at that time. And the man, let's just say he's bulging. You can see his veins from Jupiter. Like he can't fit into the polyurethane suit, which are banned and they allowed them to use.

12:58Victoria Song:So there's like a lot of things happening here about what they are and aren't allowed to use. That's different from traditional sporting events. and actually he roided up too hard. He flew too close to the sun and he started to sink in the water and he actually got slower. So that's what they did last year. When I saw what James Madison looked like this time, he was still kind of like, hoorah, bigger than he was during his prime, but not as like frightening to look at. I mean, I could still see his veins and his veins popping from underneath his whoop band, but because he was wearing a whoop band, That's in my notes.

13:37But he was not like the Hulk, which is what he was last year.

13:44Victoria Song:And, you know, that was something Dr. Bielas told me that they saw that several athletes were actually responding a little too well to the testosterone, bulking up a little too heavily so that they dialed them back. But like at the games itself, it's not that every athlete was actually forced to dope. Of the 42 athletes, four decided to compete unenhanced. So they are clean. And they did that for various reasons. But a lot of it was so that they could compete in the Olympics. They have Olympic aspirations. And if you don't, you're basically because these other professional sporting leagues are just like, well, if you go to the Enhanced Games, guess what?

14:20Victoria Song:You're banned. You can't compete with clean athletes. So, you know, there were, we were told by Enhance that there actually were USADA and I think the World Aquatics Association officials there testing the clean athletes to make sure that they stayed clean. And supposedly they arrived unannounced, but they were like, yeah, we support that. Please test them. Please prove that they are clean. So that was Hunter Armstrong, who was a swimmer, another swimmer whose name I am forgetting right now, but Tristan Evelyn and Fred Curley. Those were the four unenhanced athletes. And three out of four of them won their races over the doped athletes.

15:00I'm so torn on how to feel about the fact that the clean athletes mostly beat the crap out of the enhanced athletes. And the fact that the single greatest success came from a swimmer wearing a suit that has been banned for like 15 years. So I think like I'm always fascinated by the sort of march of illegal running shoes. Like we actually know how to make people run faster. And it's with shoes. We know how to make shoes that make people run faster to the point where there are shoes that are banned from marathons, which is just a bananas thing to think about. It seems very clear to me that for all of the science, for all of the doping, for all of this stuff going on, maybe we actually don't have any idea how to make a person swim faster.

15:50Right. And I think about like your example of James Manuson, who like went from guy who looks like a swimmer to super yoked dude with all available science and drugs to him and got worse that it's like maybe we actually don't know how to enhance people in this way. But then these are largely, like you said, past their prime athletes who weren't swimming as fast as they were. And And maybe, and this is, I think, a thing you heard from a bunch of the athletes, that just the fact that they were able to get in there and feel competitive again was a huge win. And that's the part of me that actually finds this whole thing sort of endearing, that it's like these athletes are, these are people who train for, you know, all of their lives, hit this teeny tiny window of peak performance.

16:31And if we can use science and these drugs to widen that window a little bit, that there's actually something very cool about it. So I don't know. Peel all of this apart for me. What do you make of the actual performance of these enhanced athletes? Do we know anything about how to enhance athletes? A lot of what we do know is kind of in the shadows, right? Because it's not allowed. And this is such a hard thing to verify.

16:58Victoria Song:You know, not every athlete who competes in the Olympics is squeaky clean. We do know because there have been doping scandals, right, that there are some unfair advantages happening. And that's absolutely not great for the people who are honest and show up and are following the rules, right? So one of the narratives that Enhanced is peddling is like, listen, we all know everybody's doing it, right? Let's do it transparently, safely, under medical supervision. This is a harm. This is what we call a harm reduction. argument. And there, again, there are flaws to that argument right there because, you know, you could justify anything by saying, let's just do it transparently then.

17:45Victoria Song:But, you know, there is a nugget of truth there that they are hitting on. And so, like, if you can find out what the safe things are, if you can study them a little bit more, you can have a, theoretically, you can have a more open discussion about, like, well, you know, maybe athletes could benefit from recovery. What surprised me was that a lot of the athletes, what they said was the most notable change for them was that they recovered faster. Like they could do more efficient workouts more times in a row instead of like doing a really hard workout and feeling like dog shit for three days after.

18:23Victoria Song:A lot of these athletes, okay, so when we're talking about the metrics that we're judging this particular event by, a lot of people are like, oh, they only broke one world record. Ha ha ha ha ha. The unenhanced athletes were better than the enhanced ones. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. You have athletes in a very wide age range happening here and very wide timeframes of how long has it been since they retired and actually competed competitively. Megan Romano was one of the athletes who participated. She was the first female, I think, to agree to participate. And she was retired for eight years before coming back.

19:03Victoria Song:And another thing is most of them only doped for eight weeks. So that's a very small time period for them to be doping. And again, under very close monitoring, because people are questioning how strict it was and whether some of these people were, you know, there's a lot of questions people have because, for one, Enhance has not been great about communicating its narrative and some of the things. So a lot of journalists, we were talking amongst ourselves and being like, hey, did you know this? Did you know that? Like, that's not what was said before. This is kind of weird. And so, like, there's a lot of just confusion, I think, as to, like, what is actually happening.

19:41Victoria Song:And also, let's talk about optimizing. Let's talk about personal best performances. One of the questions that went in is like, is this a failure if you don't break a bunch of world records? And the CEO was like, no, because what also is great is if you have a bunch of athletes past their primes making personal bests. That's also a success to us. I kind of agree with that. And on that front, you had, I believe, 12 athletes past their prime who set 14 personal bests. Like, you do have people who have been retired for a long time, who came back for a short period of time for this level of training, and they did set their own personal records.

20:20Victoria Song:There were two races where people came very close to breaking the world record, but like were just a bit short. And I have to bring up Eliud Kipchoge here, who's a really famous marathoner, one of the all-time greats of marathon running. And there was an experiment that he did where he ran a sub-two-hour marathon. And if you're not a runner, sub-two is just like kind of the threshold where you're just like, holy moly, sub-two, Jesus Christ. And for that attempt, he had like pacers running in a V formation to stop the wind. It was the flattest possible course. Everything was tuned to give him the best possible chance of smashing that, you know, that two-hour barrier mark.

21:05Victoria Song:Temperature. All of those things were highly optimized. At the Enhanced Games, it was 95 freaking degrees. I was dying. I was absolutely dying. People in the stands were dying. It was open air. There was no shade. This was not indoors. It was not temperature controlled. And they put the weightlifting events in the beginning of the day where everyone was just like. And I will say a lot of the weightlifters, they looked like they were in pain. They didn't look like they're comfortable. And several of them DNF'd, which meant they could not finish their events. I don't know the reasons why they couldn't do that.

21:42Victoria Song:It wasn't explained. It just came over the kind of loudspeaker where they're like, and such and such athlete will not be attempting their second and third lift. And, you know, I'm not a sports reporter. I kind of look at sports tangentially as it relates to wearables and all that stuff. But I was like, is that normal? Is it normal for them to change the clean and jerk to a clean and press mid event? And like some of the - That I can tell you is not normal. DNFing something like that, not completely out of character because for something like that, you're like the whole goal is to push yourself to your absolute limit for one second.

22:15And if you can't, like the risk of overextending is really huge. But it's so funny to me that, like for all of this stuff that we figured out and all the stuff that we solved, they forgot to do indoors. It's like, we have air conditioning, friends. We've fixed this one, too. We know how to solve this. We have like air conditioning. We have temperature control. Yeah. You can't dope your way past it's real hot, guys. Turns out. I keep seeing celebrities posts, me in the 90s versus now. While the person staring at me in the mirror is definitely not the same person that could pull off bootcut jeans.

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24:14what is your sense of the size of the ambition of this thing for the next few years because even the way they're talking to you about it this like we think it's cool that past their prime athletes are setting personal bests that's not how you get to mainstream sports success nobody cares about a bunch of 42 year old swimmers doing a good job like they just don't Right. Like either this thing is going to need to be so powerful and so impressive that it is actually a leap beyond. And we're looking at this as the enhanced games, not the old people games. This is like there's a there's a senior tour for golf that is like fun and cool.